Twitter chatter can be fun yes, occasionally exhausting and, if you’re not careful, all-consuming. With the merry-go round of tweets never-ending, hours of your life can go by as you swap stories, gossip, news and reviews in 140 characters or less, with friends, colleagues, business associates, and more often than not, with people you’ve never met. Talking to strangers has never been so condoned or popular.
That’s all well and good in play-time, but when it comes to work-time, how can you get the most from Twitter to keep you and your boss happy?
Back in the dim and distant past, in 2006 to be exact, the social media giant was just being born. There were discussions as to the impact, with weighty claims being thrown around by some as to the effect on business and personal lives alike. Fast forward some six years, and Twitter has become a behemoth of modern living with Twitter reporting over 500 million registered users as of March 2012, with 140 million active users (someone who signs into Twitter at least once a month). And this figure is set to rise with some predicting by the end of this year, around 900 million registered users, with 250 million active users.
Even more impressive are the figures when it comes to daily tweeting which the company, when celebrating its sixth birthday in March, reported in a blog post as being around 340 million tweets a day. It certainly seems as if people aren’t short of stuff to say. But sorting out the wheat from the chaff is crucial to driving forward business.
To do this tools are essential and can also offer a greater level of functionality beyond the Twitter web interface.
Some cool Twitter tools
In the whirlwind of daily tweets, TweetMeme can be a decent tool to help find and retweet the top stories. Looking to management and monitor multiple Twitter accounts? Then the likes of Splitweet and HootSuite have helped in this department.
TweetDelete; and TweetDownload are also two really useful tools. In essence, these help to manage large scale deletion of existing tweets or provide local backups, and both are free.
Feeling overwhelmed by the Twitter chatter, or needing to focus and get rid of spam then try TwitBlock or Tweetizen. And if you’re looking to share files, then Twileshare is a good shout and when it comes specifically to videos then try Twitvid.
If you’ve been tasked with dealing with a brand’s Twitter account, then it’s all about marketing and monitoring. DataSift can help with insights into Twitter data and there are several decent tools for monitoring and analysing tweets including SocialBro, Twitalyzer and TweetReach to name just three.
Of course, that’s not to say everyone is flocking to Twitter. There are still those who remain sceptical or uninterested in what the social media giant has to offer. And perhaps, this will remain the case. After all variety is the spice of life and all that. However, as tools become more readily available, understanding of the benefits Twitter both in a professional and personal sense will surely become key.